A passably engaging claustrophobic horror thriller that a little more
than halfway through reveals the limitations of its mode of
storytelling and visual scheme, Quarantine is told entirely via
hand-held footage shot by one of its characters. The story — about a
television reporter who accompanies a group of firefighters and emergency responders into a Los
Angeles tenement building, only to get sealed in after encountering a
virulent, mutant strain of rabies — works for a while as a goosing
stylistic exercise before descending into nonsensical confusion,
hamstrung by aggressively panicked camerawork, a lack of spatial
clarity and a clumsy attempt at backstory explanation.

A remake of Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza’s 2007 Spanish thriller [Rec], Quarantine
skips any introductory credits, opening with human interest news reporter
Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter, above) and her cameraman, Scott
Percival (Steve Harris), on a shadow assignment and on site with a Los
Angeles fire department crew. Two firemen (Jay Hernandez and Johnathon
Schaech) are assigned as their guides for the evening, and some
flirting and good-natured chiding ensues between Angela and the guys.

Eventually responding to a late-night call with Angela and Scott in tow, the firefighters, as well as some policemen, come upon an elderly woman who bites one of the officers. When they attempt to get medical help, Angela and the first responders
find that they have been sealed in the building. They try to get out, but are repeatedly unsuccessful. With no power, cell
phone reception or immediate answers about their predicament, panic
mounts. Soon some of the rest of the residents — including a
veterinarian, an accountant and an immigrant couple — succumb to bites from both infected animals and humans, setting off a mad dash by
survivors to try to barricade themselves away from the frenzied,
foaming-mouthed diseased.

In similar fashion to The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, Quarantine posits itself as an exercise in found footage. Director John Eric Dowdle
does a good job blending lurking, corner-of-one’s-eye mayhem with some
in-camera effects (one memorable sequence finds Scott using the camera
as a blunt-force weapon), but the script has trouble establishing a
clear timeline as it relates to the infected, so many times its switch-overs come across as cheaply dramatically convenient. Also, somewhat fatally, there’s never a keen sense of space established within the building. This renders much of Quarantine‘s shaky-cam action especially unclear and unsatisfying. Finally, a finale which attempts to further clarify the origin of the strain of rabies comes across as very puzzlingly conceived, and entirely at cross purposes with the adrenalized nature of the entire rest of the story.

Housed in a regular Amray plastic case with a cover shot that, quite curiously, is its own sort of spoiler, Quarantine comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and a French language Dolby surround sound track, as well as optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. A feature-length audio commentary track with writer-director Dowdle and writer-producer Drew Dowdle, who previously collaborated on The Poughkeepsie Tapes, kicks off the supplemental features, but the brothers don’t talk very much about the source material, and how it inspired and interested them, or how they might have diverged from it. A trio of short EPK-type, behind-the-scenes chat-fests serves as the crux of the bonus material; there’s your standard 10-minute making-of featurette, a special look at one of the movie’s stunts and also an eight-minute featurette on the movie’s make-up design, which showcases Robert Hall’s work. He’s one of the more interesting figures interviewed here, so kudos for the breakout recognition. Trailers for other Sony home video releases round out the affair. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)